Rope has shaped our modern world in profound ways, claims Tim Queeney in his engaging new history of an overlooked candidate for one of man’s greatest technologies, Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. This seemingly simple tool, he argues, reminds us that something without gears or silicon still deserves the designation of technology. No other object has so wrapped itself in our lives, and our daily lexicon — tie up loose ends; cut me some slack; tie the knot; learn the ropes. Over the ages, it has been designed to build hunting spears and Gothic cathedrals, traverse open seas and steep mountainsides, trap defiant bulls and daring magicians, and, in more macabre uses, to hang the condemned. Looking to the future, Queeney speculates that a rope no wider than a human hair will stretch from the Earth to the heavens as an orbiting elevator to space.